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Rice Urges World to Stop Making Excuses for Terrorists

By Jim GaramoneAmerican Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2005  The U.S. secretary of state wants people to stop making excuses for terrorists.

In an interview aired July 28 on PBS's "Jim Lehrer NewsHour," Condoleezza Rice fairly bristled at the suggestion that the United States was creating terrorists with its policies. "When are we going to stop making excuses for the terrorists and saying that somebody is making them do it?" Rice said.

Rice said terrorists are simply evil people who want to kill. They are attempting to implicate the 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide in their schemes. "They want to kill in the name of a perverted ideology that really is not Islam, but they somehow want to claim that mantle to say that this is about some kind of grievance," she said. "This isn't about some kind of grievance. This is an effort to destroy, rather than to build."

Rice pointed out that terrorists struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, with no provocation. "We weren't in Iraq. We weren't even in Afghanistan on Sept. 11," she said.

American servicemembers have died protecting the rights of Muslims in Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo. Terrorists have embraced the ideology of violent extremism by their own choice. "No one is making them do it," Rice said. "They're doing it because they want to create chaos and to undermine our way to life."

The secretary said terrorists have attacked innocents all over the world. "They've attacked in Morocco and in Bali and in Egypt and in London and in Madrid," she said. "And until everybody in the world calls it by name - the evil that it is - (and) stops making excuses for them, then I think we're going to have a problem."

She said she hopes that after the recent bombings in England and Egypt and the suicide bombing that killed children getting candy from American soldiers in Baghdad "that people will call this by name and stop making excuses for these people."